Chapter 20
At five-thirty, the city was still asleep, but the suite was awake.
I surfaced to the particular, signature disorientation of a night spent in another person's bed, only this time the bed wasn't the strange thing. The strange thing was that nothing in me wanted to leave it.
My body had reorganized itself around the new ache: not pain, but the mapped echo of everywhere Andre had touched, bitten, or braced the night before.
My thighs remembered the grip of his hands.
My wrist bore the shadow of his thumb. My hair, fanned across the pillow, was threaded with the faintest brine of sweat and salt from the sheets.
The gauze curtain diffused the first imperceptible blue of morning. I blinked. The room was blue, the covers navy, the sheets white. In the foreground, the shape of his body was a negative: an absence outlined by the crease of the mattress and the imprint of his arm, but not the man himself.
I listened, but there was no sound.
Then a noise. The hushed click of a glass set on marble, the faint kinetic of him moving, barefoot, over the floor.
I propped myself up on an elbow.
He was at the window, one hip cocked against the ledge, both hands wrapped around a small white cup.
He wore nothing but the black boxer briefs from the night before, his hair a wet, flattened mess that said he'd showered while I was dead to the world.
The watch was back on his wrist. He looked at the water, the boats, the city, but I could tell he was aware of me before I made a sound.
He didn't look around. “Good morning.” His voice lower than I remembered it, the accent, unbuffered by public context, pure.
“You're awake.”
He nodded. “Since four. Couldn't sleep.”
I let the silence hold. There was nothing to apologize for, no need to fill the air. I looked down at my own body, naked, the marks of him on the inner thigh, the faint bruise at the collarbone, and found, to my surprise, that I didn't reach for the sheet.
He turned, finally, and the look he gave me was the look a man gives a thing he has earned. There was hunger in it, but no uncertainty.
He set the cup down, crossed to the bed, and sat on the edge, his hands resting, careful, at the bracket of my knee.
“I have to show you something.”
I smiled. “Now?”
He smiled too. “Now.”
He stood, and with an economy of motion that made me think he'd practiced it, gathered my clothes from where they were folded on the chair: the ivory sweater, the dark jeans, the underwear.
He handed them to me one piece at a time.
When I reached for the bra, he shook his head, just once, and set it aside.
He watched me pull the sweater over my head, then the jeans up, his eyes following every motion, not as a provocation but as a kind of audit.
He dressed too, pulling on his own jeans, still damp at the waistband from the earlier wash, then the navy crewneck, which hung from his shoulders as if custom-shaped to them.
He didn't look in the mirror. He ran a hand once through his hair, then opened the closet and retrieved a light jacket, the kind that could pass as a blazer or a windbreaker, depending on how you wanted the city to see you.
He looked at me, and in the early light his eyes were so dark they could have been black.
“Come.”
It wasn't a question.
I followed.
In the corridor, the air was hotel air, recycled and faintly sweet. The carpet was blue, the walls a cream so precise I was sure someone in Milan had been paid five thousand euros to select the pigment. The only sound was the occasional pulse of an elevator one floor below.
Andre walked with an economy that was almost rude, but never rushed. His hand hovered at my back, a signal rather than a touch, and he scanned every corridor, every exit, as if expecting someone to appear and require something of him.
At the elevator, he pressed the button with his knuckle. We rode in silence. The lobby was empty, a single man at the desk, his hair in perfect plastic waves, eyes on a screen that didn't register us.
We left through the revolving door. The Place du Casino was unrecognizable.
No crowd. No taxis. The roundabout swept clean of last night's confetti and the orange tape that had delineated the limits of the world.
The Casino itself was dark, the windows shuttered, the gold leaf at the entrance dull under the morning's flat blue.
We crossed the square, our footfalls the only motion. I noticed the details: the shuttered kiosks with their shelves denuded of champagne, the footprints of last night's rain dried into the tile, the way the palms looked too green, too manicured, like a painting that refused to believe in entropy.
At the far side, past the entrance to the Café de Paris, the pavement dipped.
Andre guided us down Avenue d'Ostende, toward the harbor.
The street was empty but for a single delivery truck, the driver asleep in the cab, and the yellowed wrappers of last night's cigarettes, curled and perfect at the curb.
I said nothing. The city was so changed from yesterday, so emptied out, that I felt the difference in my bones. All the kinetic energy that had been here—thousands of bodies, the madness of race day, the noise and the voltage—was gone now, but the air still remembered.
I breathed it in.
He walked on the right, nearer the traffic that didn't exist. I matched his pace.
At the hairpin, we paused. From here the descent to the port was visible: the switchback, the banner, the high railing where, last night, a child had thrown a handful of confetti into the face of a security guard and been scolded, then forgiven.
Now the railing was empty, the banner torn at the corner and fluttering in the residual wind.
We walked the rest of the way down in silence.
At the bottom, the fountain at the roundabout ran, but there was no one to watch it.
The flowerbeds, trampled, had recovered their shape as if by decree.
The line of luxury cars—the long-hooded grand tourers, the convertibles whose owners had wanted to be seen—was gone.
In their place, the maintenance vehicles of the city, small white vans with “Ville de Monaco” stenciled on the side, and the men in blue jumpsuits, hosing the world back to neutral.
Andre didn't look at them, but they looked at him. One of the men nodded, and Andre nodded back. The exchange was so brief it could have been a dream.
We crossed at the base of the hill. The yachts in Port Hercule were still lit from within, but the decks were empty, the parties that had run until dawn now distilled to a single man in a cleaning uniform, carrying a garbage bag from the stern to the dock. A gull screamed, then went quiet.
We walked the harbor's edge. The air was colder here, the salt of it threading the throat. The only people visible were the ones whose job it was to be there: the boatmen, the dock hands, the crew from last night's security rotation, their orange vests dulled by the hour.
We moved past them all, and I became aware, with each step, that the world was giving us a privacy I'd never had, not even in childhood. The silence was so total that the sound of our shoes on the dock was forensic.
At the edge of the harbor, where the private yachts canted into the water at thirty-meter intervals, Andre stopped.
He looked at the water, then at me, then at the building across the dock: the Yacht Club, all glass and white deck, the morning sun just cresting the top rail.
“We have to go up.” The way he said it, I understood it wasn't an option.
He led me to the side entrance, where a keypad waited at the foot of a private stair. He punched in a code, twelve digits, no pause, no error, and the light turned green.
“How did you get that code?”
He looked at me, a flicker of humor crossing his face. “Sofia. She owed me a favor.”
I nodded, letting the logistics file themselves away for later.
We climbed the stairs, the sound of our ascent lost in the insulation of the stairwell. At the top, a landing, then a second flight, narrower, less finished. The air up here was colder, the light more honest.
He opened the door to the roof.
The rooftop was nothing like the world below. A flat white rectangle, the planking still wet with dew. The bar was closed, the counter clean, and the only chairs were stacked in a corner, as if the whole thing had been reset to zero.
From here the view was total: the harbor to the left, the city to the right, and straight ahead the open Mediterranean, gold now at the rim where the sun had breached.
Andre walked to the railing and put both hands on it. He breathed out, not a sigh but a preparation.
I stood next to him, close enough to feel the heat of his arm.
He didn't say anything.
We watched the city wake. The horizon was bright, but the city below was still gray, the windows dark, the only movement the regular flick of signal lights at the edge of the breakwater.
I looked at him, but he was looking at the water, his face unreadable. There was nothing in it but quiet.
I rested my forearms on the railing, matched his posture.
The air was so clean, so absolutely new, that I felt it remake the inside of me. Underneath the cleanness, almost gone but not yet, was the salt and diesel of the city below.
“Why here?”
“Because I wanted to see what the world looked like before anyone had a story about it.”
We stood that way, side by side, as the sun climbed, and the world began, very slowly, to remake itself.
The deck was slick with the residue of the night, the lacquered boards reflecting the sky in a patchwork of white and blue, and the bar at the end of the terrace was so clean I could see, in the steel, a warping mirror of our two forms at the railing.
The air was cold, then less cold, the difference a matter of degrees and of the wind off the water.
I watched the city, and watched the way Andre watched it.